Fun Facts of DinoLand, U.S.A.

General DinoLand U.S.A.

DinoLand U.S.A. is dramatically different in plant life, with ancient trees and plants, like ferns, monkey puzzle trees and cycads. There are 20 species of magnolia, an angiosperm that dates back to the Cretaceous period.

As you first enter Dinoland right after you cross the OldenGate bridge, take a look at the bulletin board in front of you, under the "Olden Gate Bridge". There are quite a few humorous posts, put up by the workers. One panel is supposed to hold official notices, but has become quite a masterpiece. Here you can find posts on a practical joke involving an exploding soda, hackysack tourney standings, and an ad wishing to trade a 1968 multicolored van for a sensible family car.REPORTED: Peter Stepniewicz 10 MAY 98

The streetmosphere is a struggle between graduate students and professors. The students even shoot arrows into the water tower every night.

Dinoland is meant to be a type of archaeological dig site, seemingly run by a college or institution. There are six people "working on site". The professors: Dr. Bernard Dunn, Dr. Shirley Woo, Dr. Eugene Mc Gee. The interns: Jenny Weinstein, Mark "Animal" Rios, Sam Gonzales. They are currently "living" in the building that holds the Restaurantosaurus. (Notice the Airstream Trailer and the "Tents".)REPORTED: Peter Stepniewicz 10 MAY 98

Restaurantosaurus

The graduate students graffitied the restaurant sign to say Restaurant...osaurus.

In the paint and plaster room there is a hidden Minnie. As you turn to the right to go into the bunk room look up. The Minnie is cast in plaster.REPORTED: tube 22 MAR 99

The loop of background music in the Restaurantosaurus appears to have been compiled by someone with a good sense of theme...I caught the songs "The End of the World as We Know It" by Walk the Dinosaur" by Was (Not Was).REPORTED: Whitelock 04 APR 99

If you are lookig for Donald Duck, a sure way to see him is at the character breakfast at Animal kingdom. Donald's restaurantasaurus is located in Dino Land directly in Front of Countdown to Extinction.REPORTED: TJ 18 DEC 98

In the plaster room, on a shelf near the rec room doorway, there is a plastered version of a pair of Minnie Mouse earsREPORTED: Chris, the Water Hole Boy 08 JUL 99
Inside the plaster room...the room directly to the guests' right when they enter the Restaurantosaurus...has a hidden Minnie in it. It is the one of the only, if not the only, hidden Minnie on property. This is an easy find, yet most people overlook it. Congrats...It's more rare to find a Hidden Minnie, so Congrats!!!CONFIRMED: Rabidbulldog...CP's 2000 ROCK! 19 JUN 00

The Boneyard Playground

The bouncy material covering the surfaces everywhere is called safety deck. It was first used in the "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" play area at MGM.REPORTED: Peter Stepniewicz 10 MAY 98
It is made from ground up tires, minimizes injuries and allows water to drain through it rapidly.

The music playing in the play area is a selection of popular songs, however they have been selected for their titles or their lyrics. Some of them are: "Bad to the Bone" (by George Thorogood) and "This Is The End of the World As We Know It" (by Peter Stepniewicz 10 MAY 98

Up by the three tube slides, there is a fenced in area which appears to be the dig headquarters. Inside you can find a few interesting details. On the back wall there is a whiteboard on which the archeologists are supposed to post findings and work schedules. Instead, they give themselves funny Latin names, such as "Trivalia dinosauria encyclopedias". Up in the right hand corner, Dr Dunn, the director of the project, has posted a note that such foolishness is a waste of company resources, and directs Mark "Animal" Rios, an intern, to clean the board.REPORTED: Peter Stepniewicz 10 MAY 98

In the dig headquarters is a small statue which quite resembles the dinosaur "Reptar", a character on the TV Cartoon "Rugrats".REPORTED: Peter Stepniewicz 10 MAY 98
The interns also post disparaging remarks about the professors.CONFIRMED: Tom and Renée Shaw 28 DEC 98

If you look up in the rafters, notice two shoes with "RHW 6-16-70" and "DKG 6-5-70" painted on each heel. My guess is that these are the initials and birthdates of either the Imagineers or workers that created the area.REPORTED: Peter Stepniewicz 10 MAY 98

Step on the dino tracks and you will feel the ground move and hear the dinos!REPORTED: Tom and Renée Shaw 28 DEC 98

The artist that painted the murals in Rafiki's Planet Watch painted most of the murals in Countdown To Extinction.REPORTED: Tom and Renée Shaw 29 MAR 98

Just before you enter the building, to the left of the door is a dedication plaque with the date April 22, 1978 on it, exactly 20 years before park opening. A similar example can be found on the gate at the entrance to Tower of Terror in MGM. That plaque reads, KEEP OUT! October 31, 1939. That is the exact date that lightning struck the tower and sent those unlucky guests to... THE TWILIGHT ZONE.REPORTED: Peter Stepniewicz 10 MAY 98

Countdown To Extinction does have soundtrack with Dr. Seeker and female voiceover providing commentary on dinosaurs and other effects (probably to assure younger riders of safety.) Final effects sequence does use airguns and other effects to create final confrontation with Carnataurus (quite effective.)REPORTED: anon 14 AUG 98

The name "Dr. Marsh" from the Dinosaur ride's preshow (portrayed by Phylicia Rashad) is a pretty clear homage to 19th century paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh, one of the unintentional architects (along with his hated rival Edward Drinker Cope) of a series of events that has come to be known as "The Bone Wars". This was a period of American history when the two men were so caught up in the absurd competition of finding bigger & "better" dinos that they would actually hire mercenary thugs to ambush, dynamite, & destroy one anothers' fossils during the night! Wow -- cowboys & dinosaurs or maybe Indy? Read some history at UC BerkeleyREPORTED: Nate Etheridge 02 MAR 02

In the loading area, screwed to the grates under your feet are clear discs, about 5 or 6 in. in diameter. These mechanisms vibrate the grates. They are called Clark Synthesis Tactile Sound Transducers (A Mouthful), and are available to the public for home theater use. The idea is that you screw them to the floor joints of your room or the underside of furniture, and when hooked up to your stereo's subwoofer outputs, they literally shake, rattle and roll along with the movies you watch.REPORTED: Peter Stepniewicz 10 MAY 98

Some weird stuff, McDonalds sponsors the ride Count Down to Extinction, when you are on the ride before the time travel you look up overhead and see 3 pipes that run along the celing, one is red one is yellow and one is white and they have formulas all over them, well it turns out they are the formulas for ketchup, mustard, and mayo and they are on the correct color co-ordinated pipes.REPORTED: QUI GONJIN 06 APR 98
As you descend into the loading area, there are many pipes running around you. One that I noticed on the left said "Citron-Limon"UPDATE: Jason Travis 06 MAY 98
I'd like to confirm/deny the secret about the pipes in CTX having the formulas for ketchup et al...I may have missed something, but the only pipes I saw had the latin names for lemons (citrus limon) and garlic (allium sativum) on them.UPDATE: Whitelock 22 MAR 99
This may not be a hidden Mickey, but it is a secret. At the entrance and exit of The Dinosaur ride in Animal Kingdom, written on the red, yellow, and white pipes above you are the chemical equations for ketchup, mustard, and mayo repectively. A hidden McDonalds message from the rides designers?CONFIRMED: anon 26 APR 02

At the end of Dinosaur, before you go back to the loading station, there is a carnataur. When you see the smoke look above it and you'll see a carnataur head pop out of the wall. It comes really close to you as I'm told because I was looking at the iguanadon the whole time. This means that if have hadn't gone back in time at that very second, the carnataur would've eaten you. A lot of people miss this.REPORTED: Chris 05 MAR 01

Before you reach Countdown to Extinction there is a restroom/telephone area around the side of the building to the right. On an exterior windowsill someone seems to have "discarded" a dinosaur bone fragment. (It is apparently intentional, because it's glued down very securely!)REPORTED: Jason Travis 06 MAY 98

Sometimes unnoticed is video showing the Iguanadon wandering around lab - this is seen at exit and is often missed as persons are viewing photos taken during ride which Disney is selling as momentos (al la Splash Mountain, Tower of Terror.)REPORTED: anon 14 AUG 98

Interesting note: Except for Iguanadon, the other Dinos in the ride are mentioned in the Michael Crichton's "The Lost World".REPORTED: The Klute 26 MAR 98

Countdown to Extinction used to have a different logo and a Triceratops in the square in fromnt of the attraction. With the name change to DINOSAUR, the attraction now has a new logo and a Iguanadon in the square.REPORTED: Tom & Renée Shaw 26 DEC 00

We all know "It's Tough to be a Bug" is a spin-off of the upcoming Disney film "A Bug's Life," but did you know that Countdown to Extinction is also a spin- off of a Disney movie that has not debuted yet? The movie in question is "Dinosaur" and it isn't expected to come out until 2000. Check out the photos of the Carnotaurus!REPORTED: Preturb 17 JUL 98
The Iguanadon in the pre-show footage of Countdown to Extinction is the main character in Dinosaur. I noticed this on a recent trip and discussed it with an animator at MGM later that day. He confirmed my suspicion.CONFIRMED: Safari Steve: Jungle Skipper 05 OCT 99

I recently spoke with Joan McLean, director of Human Resources for WDI (Walt Disney Imagineering). She mentioned that the meteor effects inside Dinosaur are done by combining a chasing fiber optic effect, with a small, non-pyrotechnic puff of smoke and xenon strobe flash on the "ground". This creates the look of a meteor falling from the sky and exploding. This is the same fiber optic chasing effect as used in some sidewalk tiles in Epcot, as well as the Norway flume ride "Troll dust".REPORTED: Peter Wood 12 MAY 01

I have noticed two different finale effects for Dinosaur. Initially, there was a lot of noise with red strobes as the Carnotaurus looms above you at the end. When I most recently went, it was relatively tame, with white lighting and maybe a few strobes. Is this intentionally tamer, a malfunction, or a different effects combination (i.e. the variability of Indiana Jones Adventure)?REPORTED: Peter Wood 12 MAY 01

Contains flora and fauna, such as cycads, gingkos, Chinese lizards and Cape Thick-Knees, that lived McMillions of years ago.

Chester and Hester's

Chester and Hester's was patterned after the tackey souviner shops on SR 192.

The "Party 'O Saurus" dino sculpture outside made up of light bluish plaster with lots of items embedded in his "hide," along with the hidden Mickey, was created by Mr. Imagination. Mr. Imagination is the same artist who did all the House of Blues designs.REPORTED: anon 04 MAR 98CONFIRMED: anon 15 MAR 98CONFIRMED: Tom and Renée Shaw 29 MAR 98

This is the souvenir shop in DinoLand. Story has it that Chester and Hester (brothers) had a dog that came back to them with a bone in its mouth. The bone was that of a dinosaur. They opened a gas station in what is now DinoLand USA. As time went on, they realized there was more money in selling souvenirs than gas, so they stopped the gas business, but continued with their tacky souvenir shop (it really is tacky). They are the only business that didn't sell out to the Dino Institute. You won't be able to miss the shop.REPORTED: anon 04 MAR 98

The train which goes around the interior roof of Chester & Hester's in DinoLand is the same train that used to go around the toy store that was in The Disney Village Marketplace before it was replaced with the sports store.REPORTED: Eric Gabold 20 APR 98

There are 1407 dinosaurs in Chester and Hesters.REPORTED: J.J.M. 18 OCT 98

Chester and Hester's Dino-Rama

The two-acre area has carnival-style midway arcade games and a 50-foot-tall "concreteasaurus."

Dino-Rama: Primeval Whirl

A family-style roller coaster that creates rider-controlled, spinning "time machines," which transport riders through curves, short drops and the jaws of a dinosaur skeleton.

There is a Haunted Mansion homage at the top of Primeval Whirl in Chester & Hester's Dino-Rama. Up near the top of the coaster you can see three hitchhiking dinosaurs who look very much like a certain trio of Hitchhiking Ghosts over in the Magic Kingdom!REPORTED: Nate Etheridge 14 DEC 04

Sue

The nearly perfect skeleton of a 65-million-year-old dinosaur named "Sue" fetched a staggering $8.36 million at an unprecedented auction at Sotheby's. The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago purchased the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and began displaying it in 2000. A consortium of buyers put together the winning bid. The consortium included the Field Museum, McDonald's Ronald McDonald House Charities, Walt Disney World Resorts, the California State University system and individuals. Both McDonald's and Walt Disney World Resorts will get replicas of the original for display in Florida and for a tour of the country. The "Sue" skeleton was partially prepared in public in the McDonald's Fossil Preparatory Laboratory to be developed at The Field Museum, and also by Field Museum staff in a new integrated scientific laboratory exhibit at DinoLand U.S.A. at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. McDonald's is the sole sponsor of DinoLand U.S.A. Casts of the complete skeleton is displayed in DinoLand U.S.A. and also as part of two exhibits that travelled, as part of McDonald's millennium celebration, throughout the U.S. and around the world, to bring the excitement and educational value of the most complete T. Rex to the broadest possible audience. Experts from the California higher education system and the Getty Conservation Institute will join The Field Museum in developing new state-of-the-art techniques for conserving and displaying this unique paleontological treasure. Public preparation of the fossil will take place at The Field Museum and DinoLand U.S.A. during 1998 and 1999. The original skeleton is displayed as part of a new exhibit at The Field Museum in Chicago.REPORTED: CNN 04 OCT 97CONFIRMED: tielo 18 NOV 97CONFIRMED: J.J.M. 18 OCT 98
The Animal Kingdom exhibits the largest most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil ever found.CONFIRMED: Jason Dixon 24 MAR 00